Michelle Styles: Hidden Histories

In 1866 Malinda Russell self-published a cookbook containing useful receipts for the kitchen  in the hopes of raising enough money so she could return to Tennessee and attempt to reclaim her property, property she’d been forced to leave behind when she’d fled Northward due to her Union sympathies. Malinda Russell was a Woman of Color, born free by law because her mother Karon had been born after her grandmother, also called Malinda Russell, was emancipated. The US slave system was descent down the maternal line based, a particularly noxious form of slavery which still exists in some African countries (see www.antislavery.org for the definitions of  modern day slavery). It is notable that she does not mention her father's or grandfather’s status. She also doesn’t mention any aunts or uncles who might have been born prior to her grandmother obtaining her freedom and what their status was.

Her book was the first cookbook published by an African-American woman and one of the very few cookbooks which authentically details Southern plantation cooking and as such is a hugely important primary source document. While she mostly focuses on cakes, Russell also includes recipes for cordials and preserves, how to make eggs last longer and how to make various medical ointments. My love of old cookbooks is such that I spent a morning happily enthralled reading the free digital version of her book.

Malinda’s life story reads like fiction – as a teenager she tried to emigrate to Liberia but was robbed and forced to obtain work as a laundress in Lynchburg VA and there she learned how to cook. She married but her husband died, leaving her with a disabled son and so she ran a boarding house in a spa town in eastern Tennessee  and then for  6 years successfully ran a pastry or cake shop until the American Civil War forced her to start over in Michigan. Among other things she was robbed of her considerable life savings by a Guerilla band who threatened her with death if she revealed their names.  I do hope she did raise enough money to return to Greenville Tennessee and reclaim her property.

 I love reading and writing about women with indomitable spirits who struggle against the odds and succeed but Malinda's is not a story I can tell. Thankfully there are other writers who can. At the moment they are often marketed as African-American historical romance writers but they are really saga writers in the tradition of Catherine Cookson, that great doyenne of British woman’s historical fiction who famously claimed she didn’t write romance (meaning books like Barbara Cartland wrote).  Other British saga writers include Josephine Cox, Benita Brown and Penny Jordan when she was writing as Annie Groves as well as Winston Graham who wrote Poldark.

British saga writers differ from historical romance writers in that historical romance writers like me tend to focus on heroes who are of the first estate with the emotional growth of the relationship being the primary focus, whereas saga writers tend to have the heroes being working or lower middle class (the villains are often weak men of the first estate) and the romance is often secondary to the woman’s personal growth. Sagas are sometimes in UK publishing parlance known as Clogs and Shawls or Rats and Rickets books.  When I first moved to the UK, the saga reigned supreme in the UK publishing world with Mills & Boon being basically the only publisher to publish the sort of historical romance I had enjoyed in the US. It wasn’t until more than a decade after she published her last book that Cookson ceased to be the most checked out author in the UK library system. Before I moved from California to Northumberland, I read a lot of Cookson so I could better understand my new home and grew to enjoy this sort of writing.

If anyone else like me loves reading about indomitable women who overcome great odds to thrive,  Alyssa Cole and Piper Huguley write excellent historical sagas. There are other American saga writers but I really enjoy these writers’ novels. They both contributed to The Brightest Day: A Juneteenth Anthology which I was privileged to read before Alyssa Cole  received a Rita nomination for  her novella Let It Shine. That anthology can be a good place to start to get a flavour of the books available. Piper Huguley’s Milford College series is also excellent (her prequel The Lawyer’s Luck is free to download). If you enjoy reading Catherine Cookson or Annie Groves (Penny Jordan), you will love Piper Huguley.

 My only regret is that because these books are often marketed African-American historical romance and shelved in the African American section of booksellers that they can be overlooked by readers who go to the romance/women's fiction section, looking for such books which illuminate hidden bits of the American experience and feature strong heroines.  I am firmly of the view that we need diverse romance and that all romance should be shelved together, not softly segregated by skin colour.

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romances for Harlequin Historical in a wide range of time periods. Her next Viking-set romance, The Warrior’s Viking Bride, will be published in March 2018. In her free time, she loves reading all sorts of romance because it affords her the opportunity to walk in someone else’s skin. You can read more about Michelle and her books at www.michellestyles.co.uk

My Reading Manifesto

By Joanne Rock

Thank you for visiting the blog!

Today’s post was inspired by a blog post at Broke by Books, after I went looking for new ways to entertain you. (I do try.) I read a post about potential topics for blogging to a bookish community, and one of the suggestions was to write your Reading Manifesto. I was intrigued.

Of course, my first thought was that I don’t have one. I read so widely and eclectically, what could I possibly have to say that wasn’t too broad and general? Yet, the idea niggled. I went back and read the prompt more carefully, and Sarah, the author of the piece, suggested writing about “your identity as a reader, your challenges and personal missions, values, and where you see yourself in the reading world.”

Surely I could do that. So here goes…

The Olympians

As a reader, I am interested in fiction and non-fiction alike. I started reading to entertain myself, but educate myself. I took out mountains of non-fiction books, studying broad topics like ballet or western art, then narrowing my focus to art movements I liked. I studied wines for a summer in middle school (why, I wonder? And what did my parents think of all my books on wine making?) and was obsessed with learning as many pantheons as possible once I discovered the Greeks and Romans didn’t have a monopoly on interesting gods.

even in grade school, I turned to the library to

The Christmas gift I lobbied for last year.

For long stretches at a time, fiction took a backseat to my need to learn. And to this day, I still believe in scooping up lots of non-fiction for learning in the most fun way I know. Last year, for Christmas, I asked my husband for a copy Vatican: All the Paintings by Anja Grebe. It’s a gorgeous book that I keep at the breakfast bar, where I learn about the Borgia-commissioned artworks over my bowl of Lucky Charms.

My biggest personal challenge as a reader is the loss of brick and mortar stores. I really miss easy access to a huge bookstore. I love browsing the shelves to see what’s out and what other people are buying. It’s a different experience than a library and I miss it. However, one of my great reading joys has comforted me in the last ten years as bookstores declined. At the same time, my book club world opened up and I’ve learned a lot about the books I’ve read by sharing them with friends and talking about them afterward.

Tonight's dinner inspiration

My fiction reading serves whole other purposes, providing escape, adventure and greater understanding of human nature. I can’t imagine a life without books. My inner world is a place that comforts me when the real world lets me down. I lose myself in books. I learn from books. I explore new worlds in books. Even for the most practical of chores—like cooking dinner tonight—I open up a cookbook for inspiration.

There you have it, friends… my reading manifesto. Tell me what kinds of books populate your reading shelf and I’ll give one random poster a copy of my holiday romance 2-1 with Tawny Weber, Undercover Festivities.

Shhhh, don't tell anyone but I bought another cookbook...

If you ever wanted to know,
the 'Edmonds Cook Book'
is one of New Zealand's
iconic recipe collections.

My mother-in-law buys books on interior design. You know the ones - they show you how simple and effective it is to put together a collection of wooden spoons in an old glass jam jar, or a pile of interesting shells in a pretty white bowl... she has lots of those books. All about creating a calm, inviting, relaxing space. And she can do that 'collection of interesting things' really nicely. I can't. I just have piles of junk, books and papers everywhere and anywhere.

I like looking at her design books - but honestly, both my husband and I have a 'maximalist' approach to design rather than chic minimalism.

So in terms of lifestyle books, my weakness is cookbooks. I had to discover my inner kitchen diva quite early when I became vegetarian in my teens and wanted to cook my own meals. My first was success was pasta. A wonderful dancer from big-city Sydney told me to "put it in a pot and boil it, darling" - it was a revelation! And from such embarrassingly simple beginnings, a passion was born.

Not to mention a collection. Baking books, breakfast, dessert books, soup books, tomato books, vegetarian books... When I was traveling in my twenties, my souvenir of choice was a  recipe book of national cuisine for each country we visited - no matter if it wasn't vegetarian. it was finding one in English that was the trouble! But oh SO worth it! Traveling, for me anyway, is so much about the food! And having my collection now takes me back to those places and the fun we had there...

Of course, four kids later and there's not so much overseas travel happening at the moment. So for a while my collection hasn't grown. But a diet tweak a few months ago revived my needs and I'm back in the game!

My ideal cook book would be hard cover, with a colour picture for each recipe, easy to read font and with cute but insightful commentary for each recipe... because sometimes there's nothing more relaxing for me than to sit in bed late at night when I'm tired, just flicking through yummy recipes and feeling like I'm having an informal lesson with some funky, super-talented chef...

... My husband doesn't get it. He just cannot see how 'reading recipe books' can be fun... but cookbooks are like children's picture books for me - pretty to look at, with lots of useful, entertaining stuff as well.

So what about you?! What would be your relaxing picture book of choice - would it be interior design, gardening, cookery or what?!?

Natalie Anderson adores a happy ending, which is why she always reads the back of a book first - just to be sure. Along with happy endings, she loves peppermint filled dark chocolate, pineapple juice and extremely long showers. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her gorgeous husband and four fabulous children.
If, like her, you love a happy ending, be sure to come and say hi on www.facebook/authornataliea and on Twitter @authornataliea, or her website/blog:www.natalie-anderson.com.